1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to a conversion of shaft rotation to digital form and, more particularly, to a shaft position digitizer providing an output suitable for multiparameter digital recording.
2. Discussion of the Prior Art
High speed shaft position or rotation digitizers are commercially available; however, such shaft position digitizers have been relatively costly and frequently require external power as well as generally having low resolution. U.S. Pat. No. 2,972,740 is exemplary of prior art shaft position digitizers using commutator and brush structure while U.S. Pat. No. 3,497,682 is exemplary of attempts to simplify shaft rotation counting using a rotating magnet to operate a plurality of circumferentially arranged reed switches.
Generally, prior art shaft position or rotation encoders, particularly those providing a digital output, have suffered the disadvantages of having complex sructure in order to provide accurate conversion and of being relatively expensive to produce.